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Unless you’ve been living under a rock since 2001, you’ve been hearing about the $1000 genome for years. The inevitable, the holy grail, the game-changer – the ultimate goal post as proclaimed by an entire chorus of Chicken Little genomicists crying, ‘The cost of sequencing is falling! The cost of sequencing is falling!’ And it’s true! Not only has the cost of sequencing dropped faster than Facebook stock on IPO day, but the product has improved at the same time, in speed, accuracy and coverage. Will it be transformational? It already is.

The early references to the ‘$1000 genome’ were purely aspirational, tossed out in stark contrast to cost of the newly-completed 2.7 billion dollar genome generated by the Human Genome Project. But the emergence of the $1000 genome as a meme began in earnest in 2005, when the Craig…